Saturday, March 31, 2018

Willful blindness on sexual abuse

Female farm workers demonstrating against sexual abuse

by Frank Brenner

The following post is a continuation
of a previous one, “Some thoughts on Weinstein”. This one is a critique of the
positions of the World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) and its leader David North.
There is a third part to follow which will discuss due process and consent,
among other issues related to #MeToo.

By now we've had #MeToo and the
backlash against it and some backlash against the backlash. For me the
essential problem with #MeToo is that it has created a climate where there's no
distinction between being a prick and a predator. A clumsy come-on or even an inadvertent
gesture can now lead to accusations of assault, which can have devastating
consequences for the accused. It can also end up demonizing half the human
race. As I'll get to in a later installment, though, there is a lot of
complexity lurking behind these simple, sensible statements. The messiness of
the debate over #MeToo ultimately comes out of the messiness of human
sexuality, compounded by the constraints of a fundamentally inhuman society.

But before that it's necessary to draw
a distinction between criticism of #MeToo that is legitimate and criticism that
isn't. In the latter category I would put criticism that serves to downplay or
marginalize the social scourge of sexual abuse. And that's precisely what it
seems to me the WSWS is guilty of. They have little or nothing to say about
sexual abuse (including as it applies to working class women) but they have a
lot to say in defense of powerful or prominent men who've been accused of such
abuse. If you read the WSWS, every revelation that has come out of #MeToo is
false, reactionary, a witch-hunt. But that is nonsense. The exposure of
powerful figures like Harvey Weinstein, Roy Moore,
Bill O'Reilly and Las Vegas casino mogul Steve Wynn as sexual predators makes
the world a better place for women, albeit only slightly so. Actually, David
North bridles at the term 'predator', which he denounces as a modern-day
version of the Puritans' Scarlet Letter. Does that mean it shouldn't apply to
Weinstein or Moore or O'Reilly? Or Bill Cosby … or Donald Trump? It's true that
some of the accusations that have come out of #MeToo are probably false or
exaggerated, but that doesn't warrant a blanket dismissal of all accusations.
When someone is falsely accused of murder, that is a travesty of justice, but
it is even more of a travesty to ignore the murder itself. If you read the WSWS
on this issue, the latter is just the sort of travesty they commit.

A few facts: The Center
for Disease Control finds that 1 in 5 women (compared to 1 in 71 men) will
experience rape or attempted rape at least once in their lifetimes. In 2015
there were 90,000 rapes reported to police, but as is widely known, rape is a
greatly under-reported crime. The National Crime Victimization Survey, which
tries to measure incidents which went unreported, estimated that in the same
year the real figure was over 400,000. These are appalling figures, and even if
we reduce them by as much as half to account for any murkiness in the
definition of rape, that would make it 1 in 10 women who will experience rape
or attempted rape at some point in their lives, and those are still appalling
figures. It doesn't mean that women live in a permanent state of fear, but it
does mean that for a great many women, probably most, there is always a worry
at the back of their minds. And you see evidence of that in everyday
situations. As for instance: is there a woman anywhere who doesn't think twice
about walking down a street alone at night?

This social reality is a
blank page on the WSWS. The website has no section concerning sexual harassment
or assault or indeed anything relating to the rights of women, and to the
extent that these issues are ever raised, they are only done so in passing. You
never see any programmatic demands or meetings or campaigns where these issues
are highlighted.

A case in point is the
Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal. The WSWS didn't devote a single article to
this story. It is, according to Wikipedia, “one of the biggest sexual abuse
scandals in sports history.” It involved, at last count, 265 girls and young
women who were molested by Nassar, who worked as the chief team doctor for USA
Gymnastics as well as for Michigan State University. Nassar was tied in to a
network of gym owners, coaches and staff involved in the abuse of female
athletes, mostly children, that went on for two decades. You would think that
anyone concerned about the rights of women – to say nothing of a supposedly
Marxist publication (and, one might add, a publication based in Michigan where
this story played out) – would want to cover this story in some depth, examine
how perpetrators like Nassar were allowed to operate for so long, how
authorities ignored or covered up his crimes, and what this says about the
whole culture of high performance athletics and especially the exploitability
(sexually, commercially and for national prestige) of young female bodies. The
WSWS looked at none of this. The one mention of the story is a paragraph in an
article on the winter Olympics in Korea.

The WSWS does have
plenty of sympathy, but typically for the alleged perpetrators, figures like
Weinstein, actor Kevin Spacey and conductor James Levine, among others. Some of
this is understandable: there is indeed an element of tragedy in the downfall
of these talented men. But surely that has to be balanced by some sympathy for
their alleged victims. If the accusations were patently false that would be one
thing, but that isn't the case with these men: there are multiple accusers who
recount similar stories, and each of these men had an 'everybody knew'
reputation. Whether any of these accusations ever stand up in court is another
matter (which I'll get to later) but legal justice isn't always – and shouldn't
necessarily be – the final arbiter in such matters. Does anyone seriously
believe that Nicole Simpson wasn't murdered by her husband?

Kevin Spacey is a good
example here. The WSWS was quick to come to his defense and denounce the
accusations against him as a witch-hunt. Their reaction to the initial accuser,
a young actor, was to try to discredit him: “On Sunday, actor Anthony Rapp, for
reasons best known to himself, accused Spacey of making sexual advances to him
some thirty years ago when was 14 and Spacey was 26.” For reasons best known to
himself?? Rapp may or may not be telling the truth but the fact that he waited
a long time to make the accusation is anything but unusual. If the WSWS paid
any attention to this issue, they would know that it iscommon for victims of sexual abuse to stay
silent for long periods of time, especially if the experience was traumatic
(which is likely the case if you're 14) and/or they feel their stories won't be
believed.

Since that initial accusation,
15 more people have come forward to accuse Spacey of assaulting them sexually
(groping seems to be a common complaint, though there is at least one
accusation of attempted rape). This includes eight people who worked with him
on the tv series House of Cards. It also includes another person who
claims to have had a sexual relationship with Spacey when he was 14 and Spacey
was 24. In addition, there are 20 people associated with the Old Vic theater
company who signed statements alleging sexual misconduct by Spacey during his
11 years as artistic director, with three of these people having contacted
police. These are a lot of accusations over a long stretch of time, and
involving different groups Spacey was associated with, which at least gives the
accusations plausibility. And yet so far as I can tell these further
accusations have gone unreported on the WSWS.

Which isn't to say that
it's wrong to be sympathetic to Spacey. His erasure from the Ridley Scott movie
All the Money in the World is chilling and brings to mind victimizations
in witch-hunts like McCarthyism. But the analogy between #MeToo and McCarthyism
(made repeatedly on the WSWS) is a superficial one. Scott reshot Spacey's
scenes in the film (replacing him with Christopher Plummer) formercenary reasons – because he didn't want
the scandal surrounding Spacey to sink the film and jeopardize the investments
of his producers. There wasn't anything directly political about Scott's
action, as reprehensible as it was; indeed, this kind of cold-blooded financial
calculation is standard practice in Hollywood. In the case of McCarthyism, the witch-hunt
was totally political, the purpose being to purge left-wing activists and
left-wing culture from the US political scene. Those activists had abused no
one; on the contrary, what they were being victimized for was something
admirable, their resistance to an oppressive social system. There is nothing
admirable about what Spacey is alleged to have done, and even if the
accusations against him are only partly true, he bears responsibility for
what's befallen him, and his victims deserve more sympathy than he does.

Demonstration in support of the Hollywood Ten victims of McCarthyism

Nor is #MeToo as a
movement comparable to McCarthyism. It is true that at times there has been a
lynch-mob atmosphere on social media connected to #MeToo, but that is hardly
unique to #MeToo. On the contrary, it seems an endemic feature (at least in our
times) of platforms like Twitter, Reddit and Facebook, which all too often
become a breeding ground for trolling and social aggression. It's also true that
in the welter of voices that have become associated with #MeToo, there are
establishment celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and strident purveyors of identity
politics, whose political agendas go from cynical to sinister. But much of this
is what you would expect from an upsurge of spontaneous outrage over sexual
abuse and decades of frustration over the failure to do much about it by
official society, an upsurge that is inevitably going to be very confused given
the absence of a broad-based radicalization in the working class. When it came
to McCarthyism, there wasn't anything grassroots (or confused) about it, it was
a full-throated political witch-hunt by powerful elites in the government and
mass media. (The WSWS tries to make out that #MeToo is a conspiracy concocted
by the New York Times and the Democrats, but they offer no evidence to back
this up. Given their willful blindness to the scope of sexual abuse, it makes
sense from their point of view to explain away #MeToo as a conspiracy, but this
says more about North and company than it does about #MeToo.)

If we look deeper at the
WSWS coverage of #MeToo, two aspects emerge about their attitude to sexual
abuse: first that it isn't really about sex and second that it isn't such a big
problem.

The first aspect is
evident in their initial article on Weinstein: “The real key to
Weinstein’s behavior, assuming the accusations to be true, is wealth. The
scandal is not about Weinstein personally and his psychological make-up. His is
a widespread form of abuse. The common denominator is that the abuse is carried
out by those with money and power. It is not about over-active hormones, but a
brutal expression of the type of pressure placed upon people: if you want to
keep your job, this is what you must do …The right of certain people to act
like this, and get away with it, is bestowed upon them by money.”

The claim here is that
the Weinstein scandal isn't about sex but about “money and power.” Why should
this be either/or? Why can't it be about money and power AND ALSO about sex?
After all Weinstein isn't a Bernie Madoff or some crooked congressman. Take
away the sex in Weinstein’s case and there is no scandal at all.

There is also the claim
that what Weinstein allegedly did “is a widespread form of abuse”. Just how widespread
we are told in a later paragraph: “But this sort of extortion of sexual favors
is not simply part of Hollywood, it’s part of the American business and
corporate culture as a whole, part of the brutality of social relations in the
US. How would the New York Times or any major enterprise hold up under
scrutiny? Sexual assault or coercion is vastly under-reported in factories
(where today union officials have joined supervisors as the guilty parties) and
other work places, in the US armed forces, in the vast gulag of local, state
and federal jails and prisons, among low-paid and immigrant workers and in all
the countless situations in America where the weak find themselves at the mercy
of the powerful.”

This is pretty
unequivocal: sexual abuse is rampant in America. And it is “vastly
under-reported” – including by the WSWS itself, one might add!

But there is also
something askew about this analysis. It paints a simplistic picture of abuse as
being committed solely by the powerful against the weak. While this is a major
part of the story, it leaves out the sad reality that abuse crosses class lines
and that, for example in domestic abuse, it is often the weak abusing the weak,
which is to say, working class men abusing their wives. (Or similarly the
powerful abusing the powerful in the case of wealthy couples, and let's not
leave the middle class out of this either.) And this is true not only of
domestic abuse. When a woman or a girl is harassed while walking down a street,
it's isn't always – or even most often – by someone in a three-piece suit
driving a Mercedes.

But a less simplistic picture would make it difficult to write
off sexual abuse as being just a manifestation of “money and power”. It would
force us to consider that sexual relationships are themselves political, which
is to say (not always but all too often) relationships of exploitation and
oppression. It would also force us to have some theoretical framework for
understanding human sexuality. But this sort of analysis is something the WSWS
does NOT want to consider. Names like Freud, Wilhelm Reich, Walter Benjamin,
Marcuse, Lacan, Jameson, Žižek play no role in its theoretical work. Indeed, any
mention of such ideas is anathema to North and his acolytes, who consider them
a subjectivist deviation from their rigidly mechanical conception of Marxism.
Sexual relationships are never neat and it is absurd to imagine they are
containable by crude categories like “money and power.” An atrophied version of
Marxism that is suspicious of any theoretical innovation past 1940 and
dismissive of subjective realities like emotions and mass psychology is going
to have nothing fruitful to say about sexuality. Instead it's going to try to
change the channel, as it were, whenever possible.

So not surprisingly a few weeks later we find the same writer,
David Walsh, the WSWS point man on the Weinstein story, presenting a markedly
different picture of sexual abuse. “The sexual misconduct campaign is dishonest
in so many ways. There is the ludicrous pretense, for example, that Hollywood
or the entertainment industry generally is the measure of sexual and workplace
relations in America. In the 2014 General Social Survey, a random sample of
Americans was asked, 'In the last 12 months, were you sexually harassed by
anyone while you were on the job?' In response, 3.6 percent of women said yes,
a decrease from 6.1 percent in 2002. Not a conclusive statistic by any means,
but not an indication of the 'state of siege' described by the various
columnists and pundits.”

Gone is the panorama of rampant sexual abuse in factories,
prisons, the armed forces, among immigrants etc. Instead it's just a problem
amplified out of all proportion by a privileged few in Hollywood who presume to
think of themselves as “the measure of sexual and workplace relations in
America.” And then we get a statistic thrown in that Walsh admits isn't
conclusive and is based on a random study. But it's conclusive enough for Walsh
to dismiss 'state of siege' talk as exaggerated. And of course, a phrase like
'state of siege' is hyperbole. But what is ALSO being dismissed is the
widespread nature of sexual abuse that Walsh himself was insisting on only a
few weeks earlier. That isn't hyperbole; on the contrary, it's a reality
afflicting a great many women in factories, offices, retail, restaurants, farms
– in other words, working class women. The British union federation, the TUC,
reports that half of the working women in the UK report having had to deal with
harassment, in the US the number is closer to three-quarters. When you downplay
the extent of harassment, it is the plight of these women that you are brushing
aside.

This willful blindness to sexual abuse is also evident in
North's major pronouncement on #MeToo. While he excoriates #MeToo at length as a
reactionary witch-hunt, he says next to nothing about his own views on sexual
abuse; indeed, the term sexual abuse isn't even mentioned until the last couple
of paragraphs. The closest we come to any theorizing on the subject is the
following:

“The 'Me Too' movement is pitched to the lowest level of social
awareness, even on the question upon which it is most focused: sex. Throughout
the 20th century, there was a persistent effort to demystify sex, to remove the
tyrannical weight of religious prejudice in the evaluation of sexual behavior.
Even aberrant and violent sexual behavior came to be viewed as a social and
psychological phenomenon that required scientific study and medical treatment.
Remorseless and inhumane punishment serves no end other than the bitter desire
for revenge.”

From the get-go this gets off on the wrong foot: #MeToo isn't
focused on sex but on sexual abuse, a rather crucial distinction. And so, the
vague generalizations about the demystifying of sex (by who? one wonders since
Freud is a complete blank on the WSWS) miss the point. Or more accurately they
leave out the most relevant part of the story: it wasn't just that sex was
demystified in the last century, it was also that the ugly reality of sexual
abuse was brought into the light of day.

I'm old enough to remember a time when 'beating up your wife'
was still considered a joke, and not just in bars or locker rooms but also in
polite society and even the halls of Congress. (Actually, it still seems to be
popular among Republican politicians, as in Ted Cruz attempting a lame joke at
a conservative convention: “No, I have not stopped beating my wife.” Apparently
cracking jokes like this shows how tough you are in standing up to political
correctness.) Up to the Fifties and even the Sixties and Seventies wife beating
was considered a private matter, a secret to be kept from anyone outside the
family. If there was any controversy about it, it wasn't about whether to do it
but to what extent. A man was the king of his castle, and he had a right to use
force to discipline not only his children but also his wife, who as a woman was
considered overly emotional and hence essentially childish. You can see this
treated in a comic vein in tv sitcoms from the Fifties like I Love Lucy.
Whenever the title character gets into trouble, her husband Ricky takes her
across his knee and spanks her, to the raucous approval of the laugh track. Or
there was The Honeymooners where bus driver Ralph Kramden was repeatedly
threatening to whack his wife Alice so hard she'd go “to the moon”, a punch
line in a quite literal sense.

This ugly reality was also evident in the legal system's
treatment of rape in this era. If a man threatened to use force in order to
have sex with a woman, that was insufficient grounds for a rape charge. You
needed to show that he had threatened to kill her or inflict grave bodily
injury. More striking still is the then-prevailing legal definition of consent,
as discussed here by liberal philosopher and legal scholar Martha Nussbaum:

“Usually the woman had to show that she had resisted, even in
the face of force or the threat of force, because only this was taken to give
evidence of non-consent. Some states made resistance a formal statutory
requirement, but more often it was read into statutes as a requirement implicit
in the notions of force and/or non-consent. The old requirement was that the
victim resist 'to the utmost'; more recently, this was replaced by terms such
as 'reasonable resistance' or 'earnest resistance' ... A woman who did not resist
physically, or who succumbed to lesser threats [i.e. lesser than the threat of
death or grave bodily injury] was treated as consenting, and the man's conduct
was not criminal at all.” And Nussbaum quotes from a 1973 New York state appellate
court decision overturning a rape conviction: “Rape is not committed unless the
woman opposes the man to the utmost limit of her power. The resistance must be
genuine and active. It is difficult to conclude that the complainant here waged
a valiant struggle to uphold her honor.”

Today we recognize such attitudes as blatant misogyny, but they
were prevalent not only in legal circles but in society at large until late
into the 20th century, and indeed haven't entirely disappeared even
now. Perhaps the best-known pushback by feminists against this misogyny is the
'No Means No' slogan. Though it's often been criticized for oversimplifying the
problem (since sexual encounters can be fraught with ambiguities so that
sometimes No doesn't really mean No), the impulse behind that slogan is an
understandable reaction to a widespread social injustice. This misogyny
misshaped what men expected from sexual encounters with women, and it distorted
women's expectations as well. As Nussbaum writes:

“Women who had been raped, however violent and non-consensual
the incident, felt shamed and sullied and frequently did not even consider
turning to the law for help. Often guilt about their own sexual desires, or
about having consented to kissing or petting, made women feel that they had 'asked
for it,' even when the rape involved violence and substantial physical damage.
In addition, women who had consented to intercourse but who had not consented
to acts of violence within intercourse also felt it impossible to complain
because the reigning view was that a woman who said yes to intercourse had no
right to complain about any abuse that ensued. Such a woman would surely have
been treated with mockery and abuse by the police had she complained.”

I recently came across an 'asked for it' story when I was
looking up the Wikipedia entry for Loretta Young, an A-list Hollywood movie
star from the Thirties and Forties who eventually crossed over into tv. Though
Young was a devout Catholic, it was widely known in Hollywood that she'd had a
child out of wedlock (as they used to say) by Clark Gable. The two had starred
together in a 1935 movie (based on Jack London's Call of the Wild) and
it was assumed that they'd had the usual off-screen romance. Young made up an
elaborate cover story to hide the pregnancy and after the birth she pretended
she'd adopted the baby, a true-life melodrama that a good many women had to
live through (often, needless to say, with far less money and support than a
movie star). But near the end of her life (she died in 2000), Young revealed
that though she had flirted with Gable on set, the sex hadn't been consensual.
What provoked her to make this claim was learning what the term 'date rape'
meant; she suddenly had words to explain the incident with Gable. According to
the Wiki entry, Young “had previously always believed that a woman's job was to fend
off men's amorous advances and had felt the fact that Gable had been able to
force himself on her was thus a moral failing on her part.” Of course we'll
never know for sure what happened since Gable isn't around to tell his side of
the story. But the fact that Young herself believed almost to the end of her
life that she'd 'asked for it' by not doing enough to fend Gable off rings very
true. And it speaks to the experience of a great many women who endured date
rape without ever realizing that's what it was.

Needless to say, experiences like date rape or terms like
misogyny appear nowhere in North's piece or in any of the WSWS coverage of #MeToo. So
that when, at the very end of his article, North declares that sexual abuse is
a “class issue”, what could be an insight is really obfuscation. To say that
the fight against sexual abuse is a class issue SHOULD MEAN that's it's an
issue to be championed by the working class and its revolutionary vanguard. It
SHOULD MEAN that this fight plays an important role in the agitation and
propaganda of that vanguard because it's about defending the democratic rights
of all women, including half the working class. But for North it doesn't mean
any of that. Labelling sexual abuse as a class issue is just licence for him to
forget about it entirely.

There are important class issues pertaining to #MeToo,
specifically the complaints of organizations and activists who work with
working class women that #MeToo is focused far too much on the relatively
privileged women in Hollywood and not enough on those in low wage jobs. But
this criticism is only credible if it is based on solidarity with victims of
sexual abuse, the very thing lacking on the WSWS. Moreover, the message coming
from working women is the polar opposite of the WSWS line: they don't want to
renounce #MeToo, they want to it to EXPAND. Hence headlines like: “Will Women
in Low-Wage Jobs Get Their #MeToo Moment?” or “The #MeToo Moment: Blue Collar
Women Ask, 'What About Us?'”

And there are some reports of working women being galvanized
into action. In November a coalition representing 700,000 female farm workers
issued an open letter expressing solidarity with the victims of Weinstein et
al. This was in the lead-up to a march in Los Angeles to “Take Back the
Workplace”.There was also a piece from
National Public Radio also in February, titled “Low Wage Workers Say #MeToo
Movement Is A Chance For Change”, that picked up on the recent resignation of
Steve Wynn as head of his hotel and casino empire (and also as finance chair of
the Republican party) after multiple accusations of sexual abuse by workers in
his facilities. It also mentions the resignations of celebrity chefs Steve Besh
and Mario Batali after similar allegations by women who worked for them.
Restaurant, retail, domestic work and agriculture are all areas where sexual
harassment is rampant, and the report quotes a number of women workers in these
areas who feel that “this is our shot to make a change.”

It may be that those hopes don't pan out, but Marxists should
strongly support the struggles of these women while doing everything possible
to make apparent the link between sexual abuse and social inequality. In that
regard (though you would never know it from reading the WSWS) there is actually
a long tradition of socialists championing the rights of women that goes back
to Charles Fourier and continues with Engels (The Origin of the Family etc.),
August Bebel (Women and Socialism) and the unprecedented expansion of
women's rights in the first years of Soviet power. While in our time it's necessary
for Marxists to resist the tide of identity politics, that doesn't mean that
all feminism has to be bourgeois feminism. For Marxists to ignore a widespread
social reality like sexual abuse is not only shameful but it also cedes the
issue to bourgeois feminism, and that serves to strengthen identity politics
rather than undermine it. The gist of identity politics is to separate women's
issues from class issues, but the sectarian politics of the WSWS does the same
in reverse. A 21st century Marxism would work to bring the two
together.

******

A few words more, this time about some criticism North directed
at Alex Steiner and myself in a comments section of a WSWS article on #MeToo.
Alex will address the philosophical issues in a separate post, but here I want
to make a couple of points. North claims that we have broken with our past
views that led us to join the Trotskyist movement in the 1970s. We would
contend that the opposite is true – it is North and his organization that have
broken from the revolutionary traditions of Trotskyism. Of course Trotsky is
venerated on the WSWS, but this proves little: Marx and Lenin were revered in
Stalin's Soviet Union, even as every principle they stood for was trampled on.
North's organization practices a brand of Trotskyism that Trotsky himself would
have found unrecognizable: no Transitional Program, no defense of unions from
government attack, no upholding the right of nations to self-determination,
instinctive hostility to any mass movement of the working class, a virulent
sectarianism that brands everyone else on the left as 'pseudo-left', and a
cult-like internal regime where political disagreements are suppressed and
every resolution is passed 'unanimously'. Here it's worth making a more general
point about the relationship between tradition and revolutionary practice.
North makes a big deal about upholding tradition, it features prominently in
his lectures and writings. But his kind of 'orthodoxy' often ends up betraying
the traditions it claims to uphold. This is because there is a dialectical
relationship between tradition and practice in revolutionary politics, which
'orthodoxy' is blind to. In the career of the great revolutionary Marxists
there always came a crucial moment where it was necessary for them to break
with tradition, a break understood as superseding the tradition rather than
renouncing it. Lenin and the Second International, Trotsky and the Third, are
classic examples. Probably the best-known counter-examples of an undialectical
orthodoxy are Kautsky and Plekhanov. The latter in particular is someone North
reveres. As the fate of both these men proves, the road to reaction can be
paved with even the best of traditions.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

While thumbing through the WSWS, I more often than not find myself falling into the trap of "either-or" thinking, which I try to resist to my utomost, of course. Glady, your articles are among one of the correctives. Thank you. The self-styled "orthodox" Marxists should not shun away from and should be more honest and serious about the issue of sex.

You will never see this level of analysis on the WSWS. You will probably be called a "pseudo-Marxist" for writing it! Everything over there is black and white, good and bad. Every event in the world is evidence that we are on the precipice of world war or on the eve of a worldwide revolution--of course when those events never come they don't own up to their childish analysis. Of course there's the obstinacy of North but they are flooded with younger writers now who have followed his lead in worldview but, unfortunately, they write worth a tinker's curse. The level of writing has fallen off greatly and the childish sarcasm throughout much of their output is hard to read. It's interesting that they boast of their increasing influence and growing membership when the qualitative leadership of the ICFI is perhaps at its lowest it's ever been.

The gutter politics of David North

The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) edition of May 17 featured a hysterical diatribe against me by the leader of that organization, David North.

Here we are today, 33 years after the split with Healy. Does the fact that North was on the right side of that split confer upon him the legitimacy of a hereditary monarch? Reading North’s comments, one would think that for him the Fourth International is some kind of franchise that he alone can operate. If the continuity of the Fourth International is to have any meaning, other than a ritualistic invocation meant to shore up the flagging morale of one’s followers, it can only be in one’s adherence to the program and theoretical conceptions of the Fourth International. If we examine the political conceptions and organizational practices of the group North has led for all these years it is clear that in all respects it bears little resemblance to the organization Trotsky founded in 1938. It is in fact our exposure of the hollowness of North’s claims to be the inheritor of the mantle of Trotsky that has so infuriated him. Why else would he be spending more time writing about me and Frank Brenner, two individuals, than about the Stalinists, Pabloites and state capitalists?

Trump and the crisis of liberalism

by Frank Brenner

It is tempting to say that 2016 marks the death of liberalism, but that's probably wishful thinking. What is dead, though, is the old 'centrist' political consensus, i.e. the pendulum swings from centre-left to centre-right that made mainstream politics in the West about as predictable (and stable) as an old grandfather clock. Now the swings are much more extreme - or rather the swings to the right are. (One might add that what led up to this was a major shift rightward of the 'center' itself from Reagan/Thatcher on – what Tariq Ali rightly dubbed the “extreme center”.

Lecture: Dialectics of Revolutionary Strategy and Tactics

Alex Steiner gave a talk at the Locomotiva Cooperative Cafe in Athens, Greece on July 9, 2015, shortly after the historic vote for NO - OXI -in the Referendum of July 5. The event was a huge success attracting a packed audience of about 50 people. The talk was sponsored by the Workers Revolutionary Party of Greece (EEK) and was chaired by Savas Michael-Matsas. A Greek translation of this talk is now available. The translation was first published in the theoretical journal of the EEK, Revolutionary Marxist Review, in the issue of November 2015-February 2016. The translation was the work of Eve Manopoulou.

New from Permanent Revolution Press

Special OXI: Greece at the Crossroads bundle

Permanent Revolution Press

Print edition of Crackpot Philosophy

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PDF of Crackpot Philosophy

Now available as a PDF, the polemic Crackpot Philosophy and Double-Speak: A Reply to David North. To order click on the button below. The PDF document can be downloaded to your computer, tablet, eReader or smartphone.
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